The myth of Hercules is one of those fantastic jellybeans of world literature, a nasty, brutish, savage story full of monsters and gods and heroes, a rival to any of the cracking yarns from the Bible but without any hint of moral nourishment to weigh it down. In Greek tradition, the king of the gods, […]
The surprise 20-to-1 earnings-to-budget ratio of a little dystopian murderfest called “The Purge” last year made its spawn, “The Purge 2: Anarchy,” a foregone conclusion. What wasn’t inevitable was that the sequel would be a stronger movie than the original. Rather than pinning us inside a single McMansion during America’s newest/worst holiday, the annual 12 […]
The nonprofit TED has been holding conferences for 26 years and has given speakers of all kinds and from all fields a chance to give “the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes or less. In recent years, these TEDTalks have become increasing popular, so, naturally, the community was more than a
The wonderful fact of watching “Mortdecai,” a runaway tomato truck of a movie, is that it will compel you to wonder throughout, Who the hell thought this was a good idea? And unlike asking that in so many other areas of life, the answer arrives immediately: Oh! These people on
To Brandon Brune, artistic director of Les Chatons Noir young actors collective, “Book of Days” by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson reminds him of another classic play… in an evil doppelganger sort of way. “In a lot of ways it’s similar to the classic ‘Our Town’ in that you have
It’s hard to evaluate “American Sniper” on its merits alone, without considering its subject, the late Chris Kyle. The sharpshooter killed something like 255 people in Iraq, a stupefying total for a single lifetime, even if you accept only the confirmed number of 160.
Early in “Selma,” the story of the 1965 marches from that small Alabama town to Montgomery, we get a disagreeable meeting of two heavyweights. Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) welcomes Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) into the Oval Office to dissuade him, maybe, from the next act of
If you didn’t know that Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, “Inherent Vice,” was derived from the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, an author equally beloved and feared for the sprawl of his sagas, you could imagine its pitch meeting as Philip Marlowe meets the Big Lebowski,
At the end of a year that saw remakes of reboots and retreads of rehashes, a year of more ninja turtles and another Godzilla and a worse “Robocop” and all the rest, I found myself slinking into one of the only movies among the 50 or so I saw in theaters this year that wasn’t
Rarely can you call a 144-minute war saga that pits elves and dwarves and orcs and men and savage bat creatures anything other than “epic.” Yet in “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” director Peter Jackson closes his second Middle-Earth trilogy with so much
“Exodus: Gods and Kings,” the second big-budget Biblical epic of the year, demonstrates on multiple fronts why we need more big-budget Biblical epics. For one, the source material is some of the most fantastic stuff in world literature: The Old Testament wouldn’t stand as the
We’re giving away a pair of tickets to see Merle Haggard Saturday, January 24 at the Columbia County Exhibition Center. All you have to do to qualify is “Like” the Metro Spirit’s Facebook page. Friday (12/12) at 4 we will announce the first randomly chosen winner (on our Facebook page). Here’s
“The Theory of Everything,” the biopic about cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane, works handsomely as a movie about a genius, one who tried to understand the universe at the deepest levels and then tell us about it in an airport paperback. Eddie Redmayne plays
Multi Grammy Award Winner And Country Music Hall Of Fame Inductee Merle Haggard Coming to the Columbia County Exhibition Center Saturday, January 24, 2014 Presented by Bad Boy Buggies, Kicks 99 and the Metro Spirit, tickets are on sale now and are available on-line at
From behind bars, one of the horrible bosses from the predecessor to “Horrible Bosses 2,” here a savage Kevin Spacey, asks the three dundering heroes at the center of these movies who, in fact, is the worse boss: him or them? He might be evil, yes, but early in the sequel, the
“Rosewater,” Jon Stewart’s uplifting directorial debut about solitary confinement, follows the capture and imprisonment of Maziar Bahari, a real journalist who was held on suspicion of being a CIA spy after the 2009 Iranian presidential election. The Canadian-Iranian reporter
“Dumb and Dumber To,” the sequel no one wanted for the past 20 years, is pretty asinine even by the standards of a movie with a misspelling and the word “dumb” twice in its title. It makes children who sound too young to be at a PG-13 movie laugh aloud in dark theaters,
When we meet Lou Bloom, the protagonist of “Nightcrawler,” we know him immediately to be a man of persistent, easy lies. He is a thief, and a violent one, who nonetheless has some inkling of going straight — or, at least, applying his considerable persistence and smarts to a
Haters who rip Keanu Reeves for his wooden acting overlook the concomitant brilliance when he is cast as a tree. The title role in “John Wick” is uncommonly suited to his Botoxian stoicism. Wick, a retired gangland assassin, was so skilled at his job that when he told his then-boss,
If you’ve never been to Shannon’s, chances are you may get a little lost trying to find the place. “It’s really hard to find unless someone tells you about it,” says Manager Barbara Robinson. “It’s not like we’re right on Washington Road. You kind of have to look for it.” Located in an office
“The Judge,” an inoffensive and generally likeable drama that odd-couples Robert Downey Jr. with Robert Duvall, runs like a two-plus-hour chardonnay. Setting aside a few quasi-coarse moments (even a family-friendly film needs to establish street cred on its own terms), “The
On his fifth anniversary, Nick is miserable. He wanders down to the small-town Missouri bar he and his twin sister keep up and knocks back a bourbon while languidly twisting the wheel on the game of Life, wondering how he managed to botch a marriage to the girl of his dreams. Then he returns